While battling politicians, writer is in a battle for her lifeIllness hasn't dulled Ivins' wit

AUSTIN - Molly Ivins, the woman known for her switchblade-sharp humor that rankles conservatives and tickles liberals, is sounding anything but funny.

The best-selling author and nationally syndicated columnist has just buried her dear friend, the late former Gov. Ann Richards, losing her to the same wretched disease that afflicts Ivins.

Sitting at the dining room table in her ranch-style home, still wearing the black velvet hat and matching black pants she wore to Richards' service, Ivins is reminded that cancer is not always the chronic-but-manageable disease she herself has battled since 1999.

It often kills.

"This disease is so not fair!" Ivins lets loose, one hand clenched in a fist.

Then something happens. The moment passes, the sorrow lifts, and suddenly, Texas' best-known leftist columnist returns to the one-liners that have become her trademark and catapulted her to national recognition.

"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person," she says.

There. She may have poor balance, only a few patches of hair on her head and no assurance her breast cancer won't undo her in the end, but Ivins is still the sharp-witted, irreverent, funny provocateur who's been excoriating politicians, even liberal ones, since the day she set down her size-11 foot in the Texas Legislature nearly four decades ago.

At a gathering in May, former President Clinton called her a "great journalist," who was "good when she praised me and painfully good when she criticized me."

Some consider a pummeling by Ivins a badge of honor. Texas Rep. Warren Chisum sure did, when she called him a "Bible-thumping dwarf" and vilified him in a column for buying life insurance policies from people dying of AIDS.

"If Molly doesn't agree with me, that means I'm pretty close to what I'm supposed to be doing," Chisum, R-Pampa, said.

(Chisum said her columns haven't hurt him one bit among his conservative Panhandle constituents and said his purchase of so-called "death futures" helped AIDS sufferers while they were alive. As for his investment, he said he "pretty much" broke even.)

Despite her illness, Ivins, 62, is cranking out two columns a week, appearing in more than 300 newspapers across the land. She says she makes a living telling folks who's getting screwed and who's doing the screwing. When the Texas Legislature convenes, she tells readers their village is missing its idiot. The national GOP resurgence has given her some of her best material. She's fond of saying that calling President Bush "shallow" is like calling a dwarf "short."

She's not just the leftist agitator with the 6-foot frame, she's the leftist agitator with the 6-foot frame from Texas, and she never lets people forget it.

"Sometimes her Texan accent can get a lot thicker depending on where she is," said her younger brother Andy Ivins, 56, a lawyer.

She's published six books, including four bestsellers: Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?, Shrub:The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, which she wrote with Lou Dubose, and her latest, Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I have Known.

Humor sustains her.

"I've always found it easier to be funny than to be serious,' she said, seven years after she was first diagnosed with the cancer that then gave her less than a 5 percent chance of surviving.

This is her third bout with the disease. Chemotherapy has claimed her thick red locks. She's feeling OK, on the whole, despite the balance problem and constipation.

She has yet to learn if the chemo and radiation treatments have finally eradicated those miserable cancer cells from her body.

If she appeared a bit fatigued during the visit to her home in Austin's trendy Travis Heights neighborhood, who could blame her. She was grappling with Richards' death. And she'd returned less than a week before from an 11-day, 227-mile raft trip through the Grand Canyon, a trip which she said reduced her ego "to the size of a grain of sand."

OK, a confession: The raft had a motor.

Second confession: Her loyal assistant, Betsy Moon, had warned the 16 people on the trip that she was "a fragile case." So you might have thought Ivins was the empress of China.

Then she laughed heartily. She hadn't asked Moon to elicit sympathy, but she wasn't complaining.

"I'm not above using cancer as the world's greatest excuse," she said.

She was born Molly Tyler Ivins in Monterey, Calif., but she tells people she was raised in "East Texas." What she really means is that she was raised in River Oaks.

Her father, Jim Ivins, a corporate lawyer, was a conservative Republican, which meant, according to Andy Ivins, that his sister could have been only one thing: a leftist.

"She was going to be anything he wasn't," he said. Father and daughter argued about civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the women's movement.

Molly Ivins attended her mother's and grandmother's alma mater, Smith College, where she wrote for the student newspaper and where she read Betty Friedan's just-released The Feminine Mystique, which was sweeping the campus. She spent a year in Paris before graduating and two summers interning at the Houston Chronicle, where she wrote up street closings and bridal news and recalls accidentally marrying off one bride to her father and writing that another had earned a "B.O." degree.

She returned home in 1970 to cover the Texas Legislature, became co-editor of the biweekly leftist newsmagazine The Texas Observer, gained some national prominence and then was hired away by the New York Times. Six years later she was fired by the same paper, a feat she brags about, because the top editor, A.M Rosenthal, didn't feel she showed "due respect and deference to the great dignity of the New York Times," Ivins recalled.

Returning home once more, she landed a job as a columnist and has stayed true to her roots ever since.

She writes from home, in the company of her black standard poodle, Fanny Brice. She never married and has no children. Her favorite targets: Republicans, Republicans and Republicans.

"Well, fellow Texans," she wrote in 2003, the year after the GOP seized both houses of the Texas Legislature, "they can stick a fork in us, cause we're done."